Friday, May 13, 2011

DAKAR, Senegal – The African nation of Congo has been called the worstplace on earth to be a woman. A new study released Wednesday shows thatit's even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day,a rate equal to 48 per hour.

That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapesreported in one year by the United Nations.

Michelle Hindin, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg Schoolof Public Health who specializes in gender-based violence, said the ratecould be even higher. The source of the data, she noted, is a survey thatwas conducted through face-to-face interviews, and people are not alwaysforthcoming about the violence they have suffered when talking tostrangers.

"The numbers are astounding," she said.

Congo, a nation of 70 million people that is equal in size to WesternEurope, has been plagued by decades of war. Its vast forests are rife withmilitias that have systematically used rape to destroy communities.

The analysis, which will be published in the American Journal of PublicHealth in June, shows that more than 400,000 women had been raped in Congoduring a 12-month period between 2006 and 2007.

On average 29 Congolese women out of every 1,000 had been rapednationwide. That means that even in the parts of Congo that are notaffected by the war, a woman is 58 times more likely to be raped than awoman in the United States, where the annual rate is 0.5 per 1,000 women.

Previous estimates of the number of rapes were derived from police andhealth center reports in the nation's troubled east where the conflict isconcentrated. The authors of the study used figures from a governmenthealth survey and pooled data from across the country.

The highest frequency of rape was found in North Kivu, the province mostaffected by the conflict, where 67 women per 1,000 had been raped at leastonce.

"The message is important and clear: Rape in (Congo) has metastasized amida climate of impunity, and has emerged as one of the great human crises ofour time," said Michael VanRooyen, the director of the HarvardHumanitarian Initiative.

Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. special representative for sexual violence inconflict, welcomed the study.

"Conflict-related sexual violence is one of the major obstacles to peacein the DRC," she said in statement, using the initials for Congo."Unchecked it could disrupt the entire social fabric of the country."

Wallstrom said the figures in the study are higher than the U.N.'s becauseit covers all sexual violence — including domestic and intimate partnerviolence — not just from military actors.

U.N. figures tend to be conservative because they must be verified by theorganization itself, she said.

Wallstrom said she consistently stresses that "the number of reportedviolations are just the tip of the iceberg of actual incidents."

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Associated Press Writers Saleh Mwanamilongo in Kinshasa, Congo, EdithLederer in New York and Mike Stobbe in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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